09 Jun Exemplary restraint

Steve Maher showed exemplary restraint. After innocently coming into possession of a digital tape recorder a ministerial aide had apparently left behind in a washroom, he showed no inclination to root around in dustbins after incriminating evidence.

The Chronicle-Herald’s Ottawa reporter listened to the recording only long enough to confirm that it likely belonged to Jasmine MacDonnell, then-communications director to federal Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt.

He immediately informed MacDonenell that he had the recorder, then held it for her to pick up. It sat in a desk drawer for months, during which interval the unusually busy—or careless—26-year-old failed to retrieve it.

Earlier this month, MacDonnell was sacked after confidential government documents were left behind at a TV station. It’s not clear whether she left them behind herself, or merely took the blame for doing so in order to save her minister’s job. Maher realized there were potentially newsworthy parallels between the episodes.

Stephen Maher,
Exemplary Restraint

“At that point,” he wrote in a subsequent affidavit defending the Herald’s right to tell the story,  “it occurred to me that I ought to consider listening to the recordings on the recorder.”

Even then, he hesitated. Only after seeking advice and direction from news director Dan Leger and assignment editor Brian Ward, two experienced news hands, did he begin listening to the recordings.

“I admit to feeling a bit squeamish about listening to someone else’s recorded conversations,” Maher told CBC Radio’s Anna Maria Tremonti. “The mere fact that Ms. MacDonnell had left this was newsworthy, but I like Ms. MacDonnell, and she had lost her job, and I wasn’t keen to make life more difficult for her.”

In all this, Maher showed a curiously Nova Scotian sensibility, an ingrained conviction that pursuing a hot story was not worth doing anything dishonorable.

In contrarian’s view, it looks pretty good on him.